Goodbye to All That - Why I Left the Academic Life: Because I've achieved some prominence in life, I'm sometimes contacted by academic professional organizations to find out more about what I do as an example that there are other things graduating PhDs can do beside jump and dance for an assistant professorship. For me, as I said, it's all perfect. But really, why would you spend that kind of time getting a degree if in any real sense you weren't going to use it? It would be hard for me to justify that to someone else unless they simply really wanted to spend 5 or 6 years studying history (or whatever else). For my part, I did enjoy it. But I realized I'd enjoy being a professor much, much less.
All the incentives of academic life drive against having the time, the need and in many cases the ability to communicate with a larger public. In some cases, that's as it should be. In others, it's about the straitened nature of academic life, specialization driven by bad job prospects, an over-abundance of Phds, and a deep, deep conventionality driven by risk aversion rooted in all of the above.